John Nolte writes at Big Hollywood:

In an interview published today, The Atlantic describes Gore Vidal as “a sharp provocateur, as irascible and irreverent as ever.”

I’m assuming that’s some kind of internal Atlantic-code for ”twisted old has-been degenerate desperate for attention“:

ATLANTIC: In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

VIDAL: I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

Vidal then goes on to blame Polanski’s legal problems on…

“an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing …  The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko…”

Oh, it’s because Polanski’s Jewish… Now it all makes sense. We should’ve been looking at his being a Jew not his confession or his drugging and sodomizing a 13 year-old girl who obviously had it coming because she wasn’t wearing a communion dress.

Naturally Vidal will face no real outrage or consequence for describing a 13 year-old rape victim as a “hooker.”

He’s inoculated.

He’s a Leftist.

You’d think that a guy being billed by the Atlantic as “a sharp provocateur” would take something other than the standard line out of Hollywood.

But why should Vidal start thinking outside of the standard bourgeois-bohemian mindset now?